Charles Abraham Elton

Sir Charles Abraham Elton, 6th Baronet (31 October 1778 – 1 June 1853) was an English officer in the British Army and an author.

Life

Charles was eldest of three sons of the Rev. Sir Abraham Elton, 5th of the Elton baronets, by Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Durbin, alderman of Bristol, and was born at Bristol on 31 October 1778. He was educated at Eton, and at the age of fifteen received a commission in the 48th Regiment of Foot, in which he rose to the rank of captain. He served with the 4th Regiment of Foot in the Flanders Campaign under Frederick, Duke of York. He was afterwards lieutenant-colonel of the Somersetshire Militia. On the death of his father (23 February 1842) he became 6th baronet.

Elton was a man of cultivated tastes, who was friends with Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a strong whig, and spoke at the Westminster hustings on behalf of Samuel Romilly and John Hobhouse; but latterly he lived much in retirement at his house, Clevedon Court. He died at Bath on 1 June 1853.

Family

Elton married in 1804 Sarah, eldest daughter of Joseph Smith, merchant of Bristol, by whom he had five sons and eight daughters.

The two eldest sons were drowned in 1819, while bathing near Birnbeck Island, Weston-super-Mare. The third, Arthur Hallam Elton (born 19 April 1818), succeeded to the baronetcy, and died 14 October 1883. The fifth son, Rev. Henry George Tierney Elton, was Vicar of West Hatch, Somerset, and married Georgina Flora Willis, dying in 1905 having had issue. His seventh daughter, Mary Elizabeth, married a distant relative, Frederick Bayard Elton, of the Madras civil service, youngest son of Isaac Elton, of Stapleton House, Gloucestershire, and was mother of Charles Isaac Elton (an M.P. and author of Origins of English History). The eighth daughter, Jane Octavia, married William Henry Brookfield. Elton's sister, Julia Maria, married Henry Hallam the historian.